Great tip - where to find cheap recycled materials this Xmas!

The Scrapstore in Gloucester is part of a 30 year old network of 90 such scrap depositories across the UK. It is a brilliantly clever charity that collects unwanted but suitable scrap from industry and puts it up for sale to families,students and groups for creative upcycling.

My trip to the Gloucester  Scrapstore above felt like stumbling in a sugar-deprived state on a candy-bejewelled gingerbread house! For a mere £6-12 you can load a shopping trolley with leftover industrial stuff, unloved discarded fabric and all manner of excess-to-requirements plastic thingies gifted by the county's businesses. For a short taste of what I mean see the video below.

The pity of it - to my entrepreneurial mind - is that it is not open to small craftspeople busy trying to scratch a living from making and selling beautiful objects from recycled materials. Well, yes, you can take out

A Great British Wrap-up

Artist Karen Green's "The Painter's Pantry" produces a smorgasbord of deliciously innovative items out of recycled materials for artists.  She paints too and I couldn't resist reproducing her portrait of the swaddled Peruvian baby above. The theme of swaddling, or wrapping, is key to much of what Karen otherwise makes - flawlessly sewn material wraps for storing artists' tools using upcycled fabric.

"I just find great satisfaction in being able to make someone’s ‘rubbish’ into beautiful items to be loved again." Karen Green  

It is with other peoples' "rubbish" that Karen creates a larder of goodies for artists which includes wraps for brushes, pencils or pins and needles collections. She also packs away buttons into spice bottles, creates sewing boxes out of spice racks and hand stitches sketch books.

Pencil Wrap £10-12

Paintbrushes Wrap £12-15

       

Pins and Needles Wrap £5-6

Karen is a trained primary school teacher, artist and screen and stage costume designer with a very thrifty streak! She literally haunts charity shops for swatches of lovely cloth that she can use to create the wraps and is a big supporter of buying local. Upcycling just comes naturally because she has always reached for the nearest leftovers to make her creations.

Vintage Fabrics with Tales to Tell

Amy Bluett of Anecdotalist; maker of handmade bags, banners and other fabric goods

A while ago I was visiting the Vintage Pop Up Market in London’s Spitalfields when I found myself coming to a dead halt by Amy Bluett’s stall. It was draped in handmade bags and banners adorned with vintage materials and above swung a banner spelling out Anecdotalist. 

I moved in to find out more.

It was a cold day and we both had red noses but Amy’s articulate passion for her fabrics-with-a-story-to-tell animated us both – this was clearly a case requiring a blog posting! 

Amy set up Anecdotalist in October 2012 to sell items made of fabrics with a past – sometimes mysterious, sometimes avant-garde, occasionally run-of-the-mill but certainly worth recounting by Amy to her customers hence the name. A thoughtful, informed person, Amy's whole ethos, including her products made from recycled materials, is entirely in synch with the zeitgeist’s cutting edge.  

Mr Darcy in Steampunk Wonderland

Rod Barker Benfield

What would Jane Austen, or Lewis Carroll for that matter, have made of Rod Barker Benfield naming his steampunk-style wares after them, and of his market stall inside a lovely old London pub?  

It would have seemed a strange, if entertaining, Wonderland indeed.

Lewis Carroll brooch £12.00

But to me, as I arrived at the Boutique Market at the Rocket Pub in Acton, it all made perfect sense. An atmospheric Victorian pub setting, a beautiful sunny day and Rod selling his delicately reworked old watchworks. Alongside him, other stall holders selling everything from Spanish doll brooches to naughty underwear biscuits decorated with lace-fine icing to general bric-a-brac.

Rod is the sort of guy who welcomes you with a warm friendly bear hug and a bushy-beard-brush on the cheek! First and foremost a photographer, he has a creative mind, a good business head and a clever idea - the watchwork accessories are unusual, extremely well-priced and truly desirable.

Lady Emily Pendant 16.00

Mr Darcy Cufflinks £24.00

He sources old broken watches from eBay, flea markets and jewellers, extracts the innards or individual components.


He then effectively reinvents them to produce these intricate pieces of costume jewellery. 


The inspiration for names came as he was reading a Dickens novel prompting  him to think along literary lines. He unexpectedly discovered that fans of Steampunk enthused over the accessories and he's more than happy to accept this embracing of his work. His cufflinks, brooches and pendants retail for between £10.00 and £30.00 and seriously, they make fantastically good gifts.

Lady Anne Earrings £24.00

Rod plans to extend the range to use computer parts and even discarded board game components. He'd also like to use watches like Rolexes to produce a more financially rewarding item that could be sold through higher end stores like Selfridges.

Lewis Carroll brooch £12.00

Lewis Carroll brooch £10.00

Creatives like Rod deserve our support: producing attractive costume jewellery by adapting discarded wristwatches.  

You've just got to love it back. And buy one.

www.rodology.co.uk

Upcycling tiny tea-stained thieves

Grace Lane and two of her mice

I spotted Grace Lane and her collection of hand-made animals at the hugely popular Crafty Fox Market at the Dogstar in Brixton just before Easter.

Perhaps a little diffident, she has an attractive, almost fey presence which works well in tandem with her magical array of animal characters, "A Threadbear Production".  The animals aren't just magical, feckless even! They all look entirely capable of "borrowing" a button off your coat, a few stray hairs off your collar or the silver paper off your chewing gum wrapper. This is because they are modelled after miniature thieves.

Count the items Grace has "recycled" on her borrowing bears!

Grace has long been inspired by her passion for Mary Norton's book "The Borrowers" about a family
of tiny people who live by borrowing off the Big People. Each animal is unique and kitted out in once grand (now threadbear) materials that might well have been snitched from an aristocratic pile of cast offs. The vintage fabrics include Harris Tweeds, silk velvets and organic linens. They are all accessorised with "found" objects.  Grace makes clever use of discarded junk like old match boxes and minuscule silver foil hats and she distresses and stains the fabrics with tea to achieve that long-lived in look!

Grace is in her last term of university at London College of Fashion studying Costume for Performance.  She enjoys playing with scale and finds second hand, vintage and recycled materials have a much richer quality to them that works well. Her artistic relations often lend a hand in the creation of the animals; her mother with the sewing, and her uncle by providing the odd bit of vintage fabric or embroidery. By the way, the standard animals sell for around £170-£200 although commissioned ones may cost a little more.

Grace has plans for "A Threadbear Production" and may animate a few of the characters so remember, you read about her first, here!

"Cheap Trash Can Look Beautiful"

What words to kick off my first post on my blogging foray into the world of creative recycling! Because they say it all. Any material can be used by a clever mind, imagination and nimble fingers to create something magnificent. Enter sculptor Robert Bradford.

Sniffer Dog

The works featured here are made up of layers of thousands of discarded children's toys carefully chosen by the sculptor at car boot sales and thrift shops. Bradford says he began using toys as his central material about five years ago after he had spent a few moments staring into his children’s cast off toy boxes. 

Girl with Flashing Eyes

He realised the toys were strong enough to be screwed to a wooden armature to allow him to build any shape or form.   

 “I like materials that are more obviously malleable, that have already had a life, have been part of other peoples lives."  

The sculptures range from large (over six metres high) to small and are made out of every conceivable type of modern plastic toy.  The results can be fluid with movement and purpose much like the Sniffer Dog above. But they can also seem quite alien and sinister, like the Girl with Flashing Eyes.

Bradford says his works provoke all sorts of emotions, that people are stimulated, amused and sometimes scared by them. Sometimes there is outright laughter! 

Toy Boy-Girl

Bradford is adamant that he is not an eco warrior; he would rather think of himself as watching from an involved distance.  He’s also too lazy, he says, to spend much time on recycling although he dislikes waste and having too much stuff around. 

Toy Angel

Bradford's reputation has grown from the southwest corner of England to spread much further afield thanks to shows in London, New York and Amsterdam. His work is increasingly in demand - buyers include Prada and Ripley's Museum. Sculptures can sell for up to £12,000 each.

His work is currently showing in Thessalonika, Frankfurt, France and Herne Bay in Kent.    

www.robertbradford.co.uk